The chicken and egg problem of fighting another flu pandemic
They worried about them in 2005, and in 2009, and they’re worrying now. That’s because millions of fertilized hen eggs are still the main ingredient in making vaccines that, hopefully, will protect people against the outbreak of a new flu strain.
“It’s almost comical to be using a 1940s technology for a 21st century pandemic,” said Rick Bright, who led the Health and Human Services Department’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) during the Trump administration.
It’s not so funny, he said, when the currently stockpiled formulation against the H5N1 bird flu virus requires two shots and a whopping 90 micrograms of antigen, yet provides just middling immunity. “For the U.S. alone, it would take hens laying 900,000 eggs every single day for nine months,” Bright said.
The spread of an avian flu virus has decimated flocks of birds (and killed barn cats and other mammals). Cattle in at least nine states and at least three people in the U.S. have been infected. A man's death in Mexico was caused by a strain of bird flu never before found in a human, officials said Wednesday.
